Gildas, is that you? No, I am not myself.

Recently, I had reason to believe someone logged into my web mail that was not me. Freaky! That, plus information I may have had in that account (that account is where I would have had sent any 'reset' my password notification for instance) and some other things that made me think to question what information is in my account, how easy is it to take over "the virtual me", and how can I reset or re-authenticate quickly and reliably.

Related to my Buddhist studies, I also find that isolating an idea or going without for awhile tends to show one the subtle touch points of interaction and thought, the cravings, the habits, that were always there but one might not have noticed.

Combining that with a desire to keep to self-sufficiency (I rely entirely too much upon Facebook because it makes it so easy; if they charged $50 bucks a day tomorrow, I might have paid to get my information out), belief in the personal ownership of my information (Facebook can leverage my profile in ads, I don't trust them to delete things permanently), the fact people must be *in* Facebook to get to information that isn't public (no email or adding people to groups using OpenID), and the fact that I realize I can - and perhaps keeping to my ideas, should - be doing it myself in ways I can learn from and improve upon, I decided to delete my Facebook account.

So, I deleted my Facebook account.

The experience has been interesting:

• facebook doesn't make it obvious how to delete your account
• facebook does everything in their power to get everyone else to use facebook to view your content - no anonymous browsing really
• facebook gets advertising and make money off me wanting to connect to friends
• people react differently to my virtual facebook suicide - some panic - within minutes (you know who you are), some initiate contact via email or phone and are concerned, some wonder, and some don't seem to notice!
• people think reading a posting from someone on facebook is actually being actively involved in their life! Ego trumps reality, but reality shows people perceive things that are just not truly present!

I've created a new profile with a "scorched earth" approach - restricting all access to no one, then adding my friends.

Facebook does not make it easy, nor quick, nor even possible in some instances to set restricted access. They must target making money off of the social network and not as much the details of an individual.

The other interesting thing of note: it seems one can no longer disable the "Friends" section on the public profile. Anyone looking up "Gildas Talmadge" can see all my friends (that might be you, btw) and although in the past you could make that private, it seems that is no longer the case.

It is particularly interesting given that for many of you, simply by seeing your connections I can have a reasonable chance of figuring out "that is you". I wonder if to a casual observer if they can easily deduce who I am without knowing any one of you.

Back to mentioning the process of deletion: So much to not only delete, but if one wishes to move it, make it portable, and even put it back, well, that facility doesn't exist. The information about us isn't as nearly important as the way we organize and thus express ourselves, the relationship between the various information posted about ourselves, and if we want it to have meaning, about who we are and what we do!

It makes me wonder how would one pull all this information in a portable way. The best I could do was to to a HTML crawl of the data - it is now in a "HTML diary" entry for the day my Facebook page died. :)

I'll by trying to post more regularly here and perhaps on my own URL/site in the near future.

UPDATE: Related idea to keep an eye on: web suicide.